Not really a story this week but something that relates to another thread about mammoths. The question is, what did T-rex taste like? This is a website by Berkley that is geared more towards kids, but is still entertaining. Essentially it uses the closest relatives of T-rex to lead you towards an answer. Entertaining and perhaps fitting for some recent discussions on the forum.

I decided to come back from my brief stint away.http://news.discovery.com/animals/head-f...11221.html
This article suggests that change first starts or is most heavily concentrated in the head of organisms and that change in body morphology occurs later. I am not sure I buy this and a recent discovery of a new human ancestor (I think I posted it a while back in this thread) seems to suggest that hip evolution permitted an increase in brain size and in this case that would mean body evolution led to a change in head morphology. U. of Chicago is a world-class paleo school but this seems far to general to be of any real use.

Tiktaalik and the other ancestors to terrestrial vertebrates had to evolve limb-like fins before any change in head morphology began, so this too seems to discount this hypothesis. Intriguing but I still don't know if I buy it.

A short video for my story this week. It is a few years old but relates to the important sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. The video is actually completely devoid of fossils so is a complete sidetrack from the other articles I have posted here, but the man talking explains evidence for the common ancestry of humans and apes without mentioning a single fossil, and the gentleman even makes an interesting claim about himself at the end. Another good example of how evolution makes sense and "intelligent" design is anything but.

A long absence as a result of being very busy for the last few months.

Here is an article about the oldest known fossilized forest, found in New York State. This is a very impressive find for 2 big reasons. 1) This pushes our understanding of forest ecosystems back even further, giving us a better perspective on evolution. 2) The diversity of this forest was surprisingly high. It wasn't a monoculture, there were several large woody plants instead of only 1 or 2. Very exquisite to find such an ecosystem intact.